Bacchic or Bacchius.—A three-syllable foot—long, long, short ( ̄ ̄ ̆ )—the opposite of anti-Bacchic and subject to the same observations.
Ballad (rarely Ballet).—A word common to most European languages, but used very loosely, and to be carefully distinguished from Ballade (see following item). Its original connection is with singing and dancing (Italian ballare), and it came, centuries ago, to be used for any short poem of a lyrical character. It has, however, a special application to short pieces of a narrative kind; and "The Ballads" has, as a phrase of English literary history, frequent reference to the body of such compositions of which the pieces about Robin Hood are early examples. It is most commonly, though not universally, written in the "ballad metre" described below.
Ballade, on the other hand, is a term arbitrarily restricted to a measure originally and mostly French, but frequently written in English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and revived in the nineteenth. It consists usually of three stanzas and a coda or envoi, written on the same recurrent rhymes, with a refrain at the end of each. (See example above, p. [126].)
Ballad Metre or Common Measure.—The most usual quatrain in English poetry, consisting, in its simplest form, of alternate octosyllables and hexasyllables; the even lines always rhyming, and the odd ones very commonly. In the best examples, old and new (but less frequently in the late sixteenth, early seventeenth, and almost whole eighteenth century), the lines are largely, equivalenced, and it is not unusual for the stanza to be extended to five or more. The most perfect example of ballad metre is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
Bar and Beat.—Two musical terms used by stress-prosodists and others who refuse the foot-system. "Bar" is strictly the division between groups of "beats," loosely the groups themselves. "Beat" is the unit of time or measure. On a sound and germane system of prosody neither is needed.
Blank Verse, on the analogy of blank cartridge, etc., might be held to designate any kind of verse not tipped, loaded, or filled up with rhyme. As a matter of fact, however, and for sound historical reasons, it is not usually applied to the more modern unrhymed experiments, from Collins's "Evening" onwards, but is confined to continuous decasyllabics. This measure (which, mutatis mutandis, had already been used by the Italians and Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, and of which curious foreshadowings are found in Chaucer's prose Tale of Melibee and elsewhere) was first attempted in English by the Earl of Surrey in his version of the Æneid. For a time it was very little imitated, but in the latter half of the century it gradually ousted all other competitors for dramatic use. It was still out of favour for non-dramatic purposes until Milton's great experiments in the later seventeenth; while about the same period it was for a time itself laid aside in drama. But it soon recovered its place there, and has never lost it; while during the eighteenth century it became more and more fashionable for poems proper, and has rather extended than contracted its business since.
Bob and Wheel.—An arrangement (see pp. [48], [49]) by which a stanza hitherto usually alliterated, but not rhymed, finishes with one much shorter line of usually two syllables, and then a batch, usually four, of lines not quite so short, but still shorter than the staple, and rhymed among themselves.
Burden.—The same as Refrain (q.v.).
Burns Metre.—An apparently artificial but extremely effective arrangement of six lines, 8, 8, 8, 4, 8, 4, rhymed aaabab, which derives its common name from the mastery shown, in and of it, by the Scottish poet. It is, however, far older than his time, having been traced to Provençal originals in the eleventh century, and it is very common in the English miracle plays of the late fourteenth and fifteenth, and not unknown in the metrical romances, as in Octovian Imperator. Disused in Southern English by the time of the Renaissance, it seems to have kept its hold in Northern, and Burns received it either immediately from Fergusson or perhaps from Allan Ramsay. (See also below, in list of Form-origins.)